


Somehow Simple

by squirenonny



Series: Shardholders [2]
Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Elantris - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Implied/Referenced Character Death, Nonbinary Character, Other, Queerplatonic Relationships, i really like the shards okay?, oops i accidentally fic'd, uhh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2015-07-17
Packaged: 2018-04-09 18:20:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4359383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squirenonny/pseuds/squirenonny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before Devotion and Dominion, there was only Aona and Skai, two ordinary people caught up in a hunt for a god.</p>
<p>Written (embarrassingly late) for the Trans and Nonbinary Inclusive Cosmere Challenge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Somehow Simple

**Author's Note:**

> "[Aon Omi—love—is] the most perfect of Aons, fully incorporating the base of Aon Aon and spinning it into a complex icon that is artful and complicated, yet somehow simple at the same time.”—Enelan

**Aona (Aon)**  
_language_

Aona was nobody important, just an ordinary clerk in a small border city. The messages ze scribed, the texts ze copied, the contracts and wills and writs ze notarized paid for food and clothes and--most of all--books. Aona would have worked any job, as long as it paid for books.

Ze was always a lover of books, of words, of languages. Ze taught hirself every language ze could find (and in a border town, that was a lot). Listened to criers on every street corner, read books, haunted the markets and the taverns and the embassy and the city gates, talked with travelers and traders and anyone ze didn’t recognize.

Ze devoted years to the study of language, and still couldn’t learn enough.

No one understood, not like Aona did. Words had power. Language, idioms, self-expression, self-identification, symbols, iconography, _words_ shaped the world. Language helped Aona find hirself, taught hir about the world beyond the city walls.

Language caught hir up in something ze never would have thought a clerk would see outside a history book.

An exiled prince came to the border city. An exiled prince, his friend-no-longer-his-knight, and the woman they both loved. (She called herself a gardener, and Aona was content to let that be the truth.)

They were lost, alone, out of money and out of time. They spoke a language rarely heard in the city, and only the gardener could make herself understood--barely--to the people on the streets.

But Aona understood. Ze had only once heard that language spoken aloud, and it was hard to make sense of words learned from a book now filtered through the foreigners’ thick accents--or, well, Aona supposed ze was the one with an accent, and a terrible one, from the look on the knight’s face.

They were reluctant to trust Aona with their secrets, with their quest to slay a god, but they needed hir.

Ze left home, taking only the most important books, and never looked back.

**Skai (Kai)  
** _solemnity_

Skai joined them late, and with much foot-dragging. He was a cartographer, perfectly respectable, perfectly sufficient in skill for most jobs.

Perfectly ordinary.

It was not his reputation that led them to him, when they needed someone to help them chart the bleak and inhospitable lands between them and their goal.

It was not his reputation, except for the fact that he _had_ none. A thin, bespectacled man in fine silk who spoke little, who had neither friend nor enemy, who played no part in the politics of a world at war because the only ideology he would put his name to was that national borders were merely more lines on a map.

(Aona took to him at once, fellow scholar, fellow dreamer—so ze told hirself, ignoring Skai’s protests, because anyone who held a pencil to a page and saw the world had to be dreamer.)

He was stiff, he was quiet, he was solemn and unflappable. Whatever Aona did, he would not acknowledge hir, would not laugh or shout or send hir away, and perhaps that was his way of trying to deter hir. Perhaps he thought if ze got bored, ze would leave him alone.

He was wrong, but Aona couldn’t find it in hirself to be angry for long.

Time passed, and Skai plotted the unexplored wastes, and Aona talked, and then sighed, and then sat quietly, watching. There were no words in what he did, and Aona wasn’t wholly sure what to do with that. Words were…words were reality, were life, were self.

And yet what Skai did, with graphite and a compass and an endless supply of paper, was life, and reality, and the earth beneath their feet, and all of it without a word.

“My family is spread across three nations,” he said once, sketching the shape of the valley spread out below them. They sat on a bluff, their legs dangling, empty sky below and the beginnings of a storm above. Skai spoke slowly, choosing each word as carefully as he chose each line on his maps. “A week’s ride away, and a mountain range between us and any king, yet a single word can make my uncle my enemy.”

He turned to hir, the golden brown tones of his face flush with more emotion than Aona had ever seen from him.

“Words lie,” he said. “Words change from one day to the next. I don’t know why you put so much faith in what people say.”

“Not all people,” ze said. “Just the ones who matter.”

Aona kicked his foot, and grinned, and he smiled back.

**Omi  
** _love_

Aona didn’t have a word for hir relationship with Skai. Fluent in five languages, proficient in another eight, and ze couldn’t find quite the right word.

It had been like that, ever since he arrived. Always before, hir words had been sufficient. Now Skai, with his maps and his silence and his wordless shouts when Aona grabbed him by the elbow and towed him away from the others to get a view from a hilltop or tumble together into a frigid river; now Skai with his sketches left in hir saddlebags each morning; now Skai with his moods painted in a twitch of his eye, had given hir something ze couldn’t put into words.

Ze scoured every dictionary ze had brought, wracked hir brain for some obscure and nuanced translation. If only ze’d brought more books…

The closest thing Aona found to the right label was a word in a language long dead. _Omi_. Love, but more than mere love.

_Omi_ was care and compassion, peace and security, an ease of company found only between those who trusted each other completely.

_Omi_ was passion and zeal and affection, a longing beyond ordinary friendship and yet not exactly romance.

_Omi_ was loyalty and unity and _home_ , a healing of hurts and anger.

Even that wasn’t enough, though, for _Omi_ was something Aona felt for the other fourteen, and for their tiny wandering community all together. Ze loved Tanavast’s courage and uncertainty, the way he led only reluctantly, always afraid that he had overstepped himself. Ze loved Reya’s insight and guidance, backhanded though it was, and the way she helped them all become their best selves.

Aona loved Edgli for her selflessness and her hugs and those honeyed eyes that knew when Aona couldn’t find the right words and when Tanavast was cracking under the weight and when Ati was missing home, missing his parents, missing a childhood he’d sacrificed to hunt a god.

Aona loved Ati for that sacrifice, and for his undying hope. Ze thought he might have given up the most to be here, but still he smiled and laughed and left flowers in Reya’s slippers and frogs in Bavadin’s bed and brought sweets to Aona and Skai when Skai couldn’t work himself up to join the circle of sixteen with their loud, breathless, overlapping conversations.

Ze loved Leras for the small touches, the tug on Ati’s sleeve when he was being too much himself, the hand on Tanavast’s shoulder when things looked bleak and their leader looked ready to yield, the way Leras stood a half a step ahead of everyone else when things got worrisome and two steps further when an enemy threatened.

Aona loved them all, even Rayse, even Bavadin, loved them for their faults and their virtues and their insecurities. Ze left them notes and talked with them all almost equally, just in case. Just in case one of them needed hir, just in case they needed hir words, because words were _important_ , even if ze was having more and more trouble finding them lately.

But there was more to hir love for Skai, and that was the part ze could not pin down.

But then, when they were together, putting a name to it didn’t seem to matter quite so much.

**Tia  
** _travel_

They succeeded, eventually, in their quest. They slayed a god, and stole his power to become something like gods themselves.

(For the first time, Aona wondered if ze wouldn’t rather their Shards remained unnamed. At least that way ze could pretend hir friends would stay themselves as they scattered across the Cosmere.)

But pretending was never an option, not from the moment Rayse became Odium and raged at Tanavast and challenged him and cursed him. From the moment the two, once friends as close as brothers, stood ready to do murder, and Reya stepped between them with a look in her eyes Aona had never seen an a flare of power that made hir skin crawl.

And it hurt, but Aona held onto Skai as the others departed, one by one, and reminded hirself of _Omi_ , a love not broken by distance or even by anger. It would endure, and Aona with it.

Ze finally spoke aloud the name ze’d tried to ignore. “Devotion.”

Skai turned his head fractionally and looked hir up and down. Was it hir imagination, or was there a sharpness to his motion that hadn’t been there before? _Dominion_ was his Shard. Aona pushed the thought away at once.

_Words can lie_ , ze told hirself. Skai’s words, more trustworthy than what his Shard said. _Words change._

They stood with heads together, not speaking, until Tanavast caught Skai’s attention. He went to talk to the man—the king, now. The only king Skai had ever named as such. Aona smiled as ze watched the two men talk.

Then Reya took Tanavast’s arm, and the two walked away, and Edgli vanished from sight, and soon all that remained were Ati and Leras. They both looked so much older than they should have, and Ati’s Shard was another lie, another ill-fitting label pulling tight at the corners of his mouth.

Skai’s fingers skimmed Aona’s back. He caught hir eye and smiled, and turned to go.

“So that’s it?” Leras asked. Skai froze. “Are we just going to go our separate ways, pretend the last ten years never happened?”

Skai didn’t turn. His posture was all sharp lines and tense muscles—muscle he didn’t use to have, muscle won from a long and bitter war. “We’re more than men now, Leras,” he said. “We’re gods. What do you think will happen if we all stayed in one place? What do you think would have happened if Rayse had attacked Tanavast instead of leaving?”

“It’s safer to split up,” Aona said. They weren’t the words ze wanted, but they were all ze could find.

An argument built on Leras’s face, but Ati held him back. “Let them go, Leras. We have to.”

No one said anything further. What was there to say? Even words were powerless to change this. Skai and Aona stood side by side, raised their hands to a force that called out to their Shards, and pulled themselves across the Cosmere to their new home.

**Ati**  
_hope_

Aona did not forget.

Centuries passed, but Aona did not forget hir friends. Hir Shard gave hir power beyond anything the sixteen had held in their quest. Power not quite matching the one they had slain, but enough to make Aona a god.

And ze used it. While Skai mapped their planet, sketched the shape of the land and carved national borders into the very spirit of the world—only more lines on a map, he said even now, but with a zeal that made his words sharp and a fire in his eyes that broke Aona’s heart—Aona wrote hir family into the fabric of the world.

_Aon_ , language, tied to Aona’s very essence. To lend hir words power, real power, lasting power.

_Ati,_ hope, for the youth who smiled when Ruin came down on his shoulders. To guard him against his Shard and to preserve the part of him the war had tried very hard to kill.

_Kai_ , solemnity, for Skai, who led the world to war to burn his borders into the hearts of humanity.

(Dominion ze did not give a name in hir new language. Ze would not make that more real than it already was. Dominion ze tied instead to _Omi_ , to love, as much as a Shard like that could be bound.)

Aona gave them all Aons—gave them all a bit of hirself. The Words were a prayer and a memory and a spell, a tiny gesture, but maybe enough. _Omi_ bound them together, and Devotion followed them always, heedless of the space between them.

**Sheo  
** _death_

Devotion followed them even after death. Even after Rayse came and broke them and killed what remained of Aona and Skai.

(After so long, ze wondered how much of hirself remained, anyway.)

The Words remained, though, and surrendered to Dominion’s lines to grant humanity the protection Aona could no longer provide.

Ze never gave death an Aon, though in time the meaning of Aon Sheo would drift.

Sheo was many things, but death was not one. It was an ending, and a farewell. A drifting apart, a twisting of purpose.

Sheo was a Shattering.

A breaking of _Omi_.

And perhaps that _was_ death, for Aona had begun to die they day sixteen friends became sixteen scattered Shards.

But Even _Sheo_ could not break _Omi_ completely. Aona died, but hir love remained, anchored on Sel but stretching out across the Cosmere for the family ze never had managed to forget. Hir love, and hir words, reminding the Shards of who they once had been.

Words, after all, had power.


End file.
